Marketing in real life
It’s not too often that the perfect example to explain why your startup is necessary to the world comes along serendipitously, but this is what happened this week for Spotted.
Actually, this happened twice this week.
During one of last week’s Cavs-Raptors blowouts, Lebron James ended up in the crowd during what was a relatively easy win for Cleveland. The game was so out of hand that James mocked drinking a beer he had grabbed from a courtside vendor. The beer company used a photo of the moment on Twitter to take advantage of its product’s use by a sports celebrity. However, James’s reps threatened legal action unless the image was taken down by the beer company for illegal use of Lebron’s likeness.
There’s a bit more intrigue to the story (here), but this issue about the use of celebrity photos using a product, in media res, is why Janet Comenos founded her digital celebrity advertising platform.
Spotted allows brands to legally advertise using paparazzi images in which their products are used by compensating both the celebrity and the photographer.
The example of what happened with Lebron and Great Lakes Brewing Co. is exactly the type of scenario for which Spotted was created. As Comenos explained, “We built Spotted for the purpose of allowing brands to legally advertise with real-life paparazzi photos of celebrities using their brand.”
“LeBron’s attorney likely went after Great Lakes Brewery for infringing on LeBron’s rights of publicity, which are the state-by-state laws that dictate how a famous person’s name and likeness can be used for commercial purposes without their consent,” she added.
“Long story short, brands (regardless of how big or how small) should never use a paparazzi photo for advertising purposes without approval from the celebrity,” Comenos said. “Prior to Spotted, the only way for a brand to use these photos was via a costly endorsement deal with the celebrity. Spotted, for a small fraction of the cost of celebrity endorsement, now allows the brand to legally advertise with these photos.”
Comenos is definitely onto something as this wasn’t the only incident that was in the news this week involving celebrity social media endorsements. Jezebel had a story today about the Federal Trade Commission sending letters of warning to celebrity influencers for not disclosing sponsored content. As Comenos explained, this isn’t exactly similar to what Spotted does, because these potentially offending posts are organic, meaning they are set up by the brands and the influencers.
“All influencer marketing that I’ve seen requires the brand to script the content with the celebrity and requires the celebrity to post the content on their social channels,” Comenos said. “With organically posted content, the influencer must disclose the paying relationship with the brand by adding #ad or #sponsored at the end of the post.”
“Conversely, all of Spotted’s outputs are targeted ads (no organic posts) that automatically have “sponsored” at the top of the ad. Our ads feature real-life paparazzi photos of celebrities actually using that brand,” she added.
As Comenos told me in another recent conversation about Spotted, most celebrities have been open to what Spotted is doing and are happy to receive compensation from brands that they just happen to be caught using. It’s so been so successful that Comenos explained that more recently, once a celebrity realizes the value of getting “caught” using specific products, they tend to get captured using other products from the same brand.
Under-the-radar
This week, we’ll focus on a few companies that are not getting quite enough of the attention they should, even though they just concluded their participation in Boston’s successful Techstars program.
I’ve said this many times over: Boston has traditionally had the most successful output of any of Techstars’ programs. Companies like DocTrackr, Localytics, GrabCAD, Evertrue, Help Scout, Placester, PillPack, Amino, and more, who have been acquired or raised significant amounts of money, have all come through Boston Techstars.
At last week’s Demo Day, there were quite a few great ideas pitched by the 13 ventures in the most recent cohort. But three stand out, having generated buzz prior to Demo Day, and, being the first companies mentioned when I asked investors at the event who impressed them most.
Nix – Nix is a bio-sensor company that tracks, in real-time, the hydration needs of athletes. CEO Meridith Unger has a wealth of experience, from leading life sciences companies in the past two stints in venture capital (Lux and the life sciences side of Atlas). She also has a few accomplishments to speak of, including a Blatvonik fellowship at HBS and completing all but one of the World Major Marathons. Nix is currently kicking off a new round of fundraising and is a key part of the robust sports technology market in Boston, which includes fellow Harvard Innovation Labs alum Whoop.
RateGravity – Another company in a fast-growing space, RateGravity is trying to change the way consumers finance their homes by removing the salespeople involved in the mortgage and refinancing processes. Led by Patrick Boyaggi and Mike Tassone, RateGravity announced on the morning of Techstars Demo Day that it had raised $2 million in funding from the likes of former Where and PayPal guys David Chang and Walt Doyle, Evertrue’s Brent Grinna, Diane Hessan and InsightSquared’s Fred Shilmover. Its list of advisors list is impressive as well, including Jere Doyle and Brian Kalma, among others. This is a busy market with a bunch of fin-tech startups taking different approaches to home financing, including Rocket Mortgage and Boulder-based Neat Capital.
Tive – While some major brands are rushing to research, test, and build out complex processes for driverless shipping, Tive is solving a less sexy, yet more substantial problem for the supply chain. Its multi-sensor tracker uses cellular connectivity monitor shipments in real-time. Hyperplane VC’s Vivjan Myrto mentioned Tive a couple months ago when I sat down with him to find out which companies in Boston weren’t getting enough love. From the reception at Techstars, I’d say this is definitely another company to keep an eye on.
What went down this week…
Congrats to the team from Grammarly on their recently announced first round of investment funding. The company, founded in 2009, raised $110 million, for its AI-enabled grammar and spelling tool, from the likes of General Catalyst, Spark Capital, and more. You read that number right, $110M for the previously bootstrapped SF-based company. Although there isn’t any real Boston connection — Hemant Teneja was the lead for GC, and he’s based out west; Jeremy Phillips was the point man for Spark, and he’s in NYC — I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to Grammarly because its services have been vital to the improvement of this newsletter in so many ways.
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